Playing With Water: Alone on a Philippine Island

Description

A classic of travel writing. For many years award-winning writer James Hamilton-Paterson spent a third of each year on an otherwise uninhabited Philippine island, spear-fishing for survival. Playing with Water tells us why he did. Yet it also gives an account of life in that class-bound country as a whole. For it is in places like this rather than Manila of the international news reports that the underlying political and cultural reality of the Philippines may be seen.

James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds, which was hailed as a classic account of the golden age of British aviation. He won a Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Gerontius, and among his many other celebrated books are Seven-Tenths, one of the finest books written in recent times about the oceans, the satirical trilogy that began with Cooking with Fernet Branca, and the autobiographical Playing With Water.